Into the Night
by Pandora North Star
Summary: Inspired by the song Come Away with Me, but not a songfic. The day after Chosen Buffy talks with Giles and tries to deal with the loss of Spike.


Title: The Coming of Night  
  
Author: PNS*  
  
Summary: Sorta songfic about the day after Chosen as Buffy reckons with her lose and her future.  
  
*Come away with me in the night.*  
  
Buffy opened her eyes to a cold, blue-gray sky outside the window. She turned her head right into Xander's arm which was clothed in his traditional flannel shirt, which was beginning to smell after wearing it for two days straight.   
  
She wrinkled her nose as her senses began to kick in. Her neck ached from being cramped in the same position in the straight backed pleather seats of the bus. Xander stiffened beside her, a familiar name crossing his lips with a whimper. Buffy pressed her fingers onto his arm in comfort.  
  
There was something familiar and oddly comforting about the song playing over the bus's radio. *Come away with me, on a bus.* Most of the bus's residents were still asleep in the deep night. Buffy and Giles, who was driving, were the only ones awake.  
  
Carefully crawling over Xander, she slipped out into the aisle and walked up the black rubber track to the front. She passed all the sleeping Slayers on her way, curled up alone or with others. Willow was resting in Kennedy's arms, as was Faith and Woods.  
  
Buffy plopped down behind Giles and rested her chin on the pleather seating.  
  
She flashebacked to the moment in the rest stop where Giles had stopped her to question her on what had happened in the final moments. She had brushed him off, not ready to reveal the gutwrenching truth just yet.Her heart still twisted every time she closed her eyes at the vision of Spike in his last few moments. It was any wonder she could get any sleep.   
  
"Buffy," Giles greeted her, at last.  
  
"Didn't anyone ever tell you buses are not the way of the future? Little motor scooters are." They always joked. Jokes kept people from crying.   
  
"You used to share everything with me."  
  
"No I didn't."  
  
"After the fact you did."  
  
"I did. Only when the outcome was disasterous."  
  
"Hasn't it been?" He looked briefly into the rearview mirror to catch her eye. She noticed the deepened wrinkles on his face. Her Giles was getting older. Old even.  
  
"In the last moments I tried to tell him that I loved him. That we could be together. But he knew it could never work out. I think that's why he stayed. Some part of me did love him, Giles. I hope he knows that he died, loved." A tear trickled down her cheek. *Come away with me and we'll kiss, On a mountain top Come away with me  
  
And I'll never stop loving you.* She hadn't shared her pain with anyone yet over the words he had tossed back at her in the hellmouth.  
  
"Do you know that it's hard to admit it, even after all this time that he loved you. And through that love he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice."  
  
  
  
"We already established that."  
  
"I think that you don't realize that it is bigger than love, Buffy. Yours and his. It's what you did for Dawn. For us." Buffy paused to consider the emotions attached to that moment two years earlier. It wasn't just love she had felt up on that platform. It was a complete sense of rightness and understanding. An absolute certainty of her role in the world. And her commitment to fulfilling it.  
  
"What if I miss him, Giles? Miss him so much I can't breathe?" Maybe spending the night in his arms had been a mistake. To glimpse what lay beyond their constant rutting to something deeper. She would never know what it would be like to be held every night. She had her freedom now, and she was still cookie dough but she could be cookie dough and still cuddle. It was the powerlessness to stop it that clung to her dreams.  
  
"You will miss him and you will move on." His words held subtle inflections of a day so recently when Buffy stood at the brink of a chasm and smiled.  
  
"He tried to crucify himself in my name. He got a soul for me. How do you go on in a spirit of love so overwhelming?"  
  
"By taking it each day as it comes, just like the masses." He turned to grin at her, his rye smile taunt across his aging skin.   
  
"And what comes today, Giles? Huh? And tomorrow?"  
  
"Perhaps a change of clothing. A visit to a bank to draw money from my UK account. Maybe a stop in cleveland to see the other Hellmouth."  
  
"Cleveland? Must we? That city is so lame."  
  
"Do you have any suggestions as another homeless individual?"  
  
"Not really."  
  
"Cleveland it is, then." Giles pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and Buffy stood. Her stomach growled reminding her that in the course of their traveling the previous day they had only stopped once for food, because they only had a few dollars between them.  
  
Xander was awake when she returned to her seat. She plopped down next to him and he put an arm around her. *And I want to wake up with the rain, falling on a tin roof. While I'm safe there in your arms.  
  
So all I ask is for you, to come away with me in the night,  
  
Come away with me.* She snuggled close to his smelly flannel self.   
  
"I don't know if it's any comfort but I think I tolerated Spike better than Angel. He never actually killed anyone we knew very well. And his hair doesn't defy gravity." Buffy giggled into his shirt.   
  
"Thank goodness he can't hear you say that. He would think you were harping on his manhood."  
  
"Harping? Picked up new vocabulary too?"  
  
"Shut up, Xander." Buffy rolled her eyes. "I can still kick your ass. Most of the girls on this bus can."  
  
"I only mildly resent that statement because I am secure in my manhood."  
  
"Some people are trying to sleep here," Dawn called out, jokingly. For the moment their conversation was put aside. Buffy closed her eyes again, mulling over what had been discussed.   
  
She would go on, not much stopped her. But she would never be the same. And all that had happened, with the Hellmouth, with Spike, all of it would be ingredients into the cookie dough of Buffy. And she would have to settle for that. And maybe Spike would be watching "How it all ended," from wherever he was.  
  
She smiled to herself as the bus rode on, into the night. 


End file.
